Tips for improving children's reading and writing

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This week has been rather busy: recovery from half term, the production of the parish magazine which I now edit for my sins and a visit from McOther’s folks. As a result there hasn’t been time for much.

However, this afternoon, I got out into our garden for a spot of metal detecting. Our garden is a bit hit and miss. The first thing I found in it was a clay pipe head; early because it was small, from the period when tobacco was still expensive. The second thing was this.

Yep, believe it or not, that’s a bead which, upon presentation at my metal detecting club, was deemed to be Saxon. Yeh I was pretty gobsmacked and all.

So, this afternoon, I thought I’d go and have a look outside and see what I could find. One hole was left with the ‘treasure’ in situ because Harrison, our nut…

Begin a scene with this line: Clocks aren’t supposed to stand still like that.

Include all of these elements into a scene: a wine glass, a translation book, awe, and a puzzle piece.

Write a scene with a court jester who doesn’t think he’s funny.

The Jester

Clocks aren’t supposed to stand still like that, Jasper the Jester thought to himself as he stood in front of the twin thrones. He was sweating profusely under his jester’s suit, standing there, waiting to be acknowledged by the King. He’d travailed far for this chance to perform for the Court. He failed at everything else he’d attempted to do. How hard could it be to tell a few jokes? Jasper shifted slightly, moving from one foot to the other. Easy if you’re funny, he thought morosely, which I’m not. No sense of humor, no…

HOW TO REMOVE A BACKGROUND IN PHOTOSHOP

Sometimes, you find the perfect image for your needs, but it’s part of another picture.

You don’t want to use the entire picture. A simple crop won’t suffice. You’d really love to extract just that image from the background.

Similarly, if you shop for a stock image at ShutterStock or iStockPhoto, sometimes you can purchase a whole set of similar objects in a single picture, instead of buying each one individually. When the images are packed tightly, sometimes a simple rectangular crop won’t work to extract just one image. What you need to know is how to remove one object from the background.

There are several ways that you might remove an image from its background (or remove the background from an image) using Adobe PhotoShop.

I will discuss two different ways to approach this, and discuss both simple and complex cases.